leonh%hhb@princeton.edu (leon howorth) (05/19/89)
I would appreciate receiving comments from anyone out there who has been using Exabyte Tape systems sold by Apunix Computer Services of San Diego. I would also appreciate comments regarding their "Multiple Dump Control Program", which I understand is provided for a small fee with the tape systems. (Specifically, this is a program they developed for dumping a network of SUNs or BSD UNIX systems to a single Exabyte tape). Thanks. Leon Howorth, HHB Systems, 201-848-8000 ext. 243 UUCP: ...princeton!hhb!leonh
nao@cuatro.bellcore.com (Neil Ostroff) (05/25/89)
In >X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 301, message 6 of 9 leonh%hhb@princeton.edu (leon howorth) writes: >I would appreciate receiving comments from anyone out there who has been >using Exabyte Tape systems sold by Apunix Computer Services of San Diego. >I would also appreciate comments regarding their "Multiple Dump Control >Program" I recently purchased an exabyte drive from Artecon and related software from Apunix (because the Artecon exabyte drive does not include software) for a Sun 4/280 (SunOs 4.0.1). The software included an excellent exabyte driver, a not-too useful dump control/tape positioning program, a terrific tape status program, a very slow tape scan program, and a public domain tape copy program. Here's my 2 cents: All exabyte drives are equal. The only differences are in packaging, price, delivery time, warrenty, documentation, and software. I was very interested in getting the exabyte driver software because the SunOs 4.0 and 4.0.1 scsi tape driver software does not fully support the exabyte drive (e.g., status does not work, can't back space files and records, can't forward space records). The Apunix driver supports all of these functions perfectly. This was very important to me because I do 7 days of unattended backups onto a single tape. With the Sun scsi tape driver, backups would be screwed up because of excessive errors, the tape is removed and reinserted, a new tape is inserted, power to the tape drive and/or CPU is lost, or a sytem reset occurs. All this because I can't get status. As for the dump control program, it's basically a front end to the normal Sun dump program. I don't use it. Instead, I modified their software (source code is included) to do dumps very reliably. The bad news on the driver software is that it depends on Sun supplied scsi software that may change in future releases of SunOs (unless you buy their SCSI to VME adapter). Neil Ostroff Bell Communications Research | UUCP: bcr!maestro!nao 100 Schultz Dr. NVC-5J443 | ARPA: nao@cuatro.bellcore.com Red Bank, NJ 07701 | PHONE: (201) 758-5741
richard%sunkist.West@sun.com (Richard Seegmiller) (06/17/89)
Apologies for not seeing this sooner, but I've been busy with non-system tasks and now that I'm back to this, it take a while to wade through 80 or so back issues of this stuff. We here have been using the mdump utility from APUNIX now for about 8 months and have had very few problems with it. We have been using the Exabyte drive on our 3/260 file server using a Sun SCSI-3 (si) host adapter. The file server is running OS 3.5. For OS 3.5 we use Sun's standard st device driver and our mdumps have proceeded fine every weekday for the past 8 months. Every day we perform a level 0 dump of the entire file server, in addition to dumping every diskless client. For the most (all) part, we have only had to use our backups because somebody deletes his file(s) accidentally. The restores have occured without incident. Recently we had to move the Exabyte drive to a workstation and use the (si) host adapter for some other hardware application. There were a few caveats that APUNIX helped me work through, but the mdump utility still works fine. Though the dumps take longer, they still seem to be reliable. My understanding is that the 3.5 st driver works fine, but that for 4.0.x one should use the driver supplied by APUNIX. Besides, the APUNIX driver seems to be the best one on the market. It is more likely to maintain streaming than any other device driver for the Sun SCSI-3 or Ciprico host adapters, since the driver is specific to tapes only. Richard Seegmiller De La Rue Printrak phone: (714) 666 8033 x484 email: ...sun!sunkist!sol!richard But then what do I know...I'm just a satisfied customer.